On radio: the thrill of Beckett - without the throat-clearing

Gillian Reynolds

12:01AM BST 18 Apr 2006

Gillian Reynolds expounds the virtues of plays on air as opposed to stage productions

There is a passage in Waiting for Godot that would melt a heart of stone. Vladimir and Estragon are talking about dead voices. "They make a noise like wings," says Vladimir. "Like leaves," says Estragon." "Like sand," says Vladimir. "Like leaves," says Estragon. "They all speak together," says Vladimir. "Each one to itself," says Estragon.

In the superb stage performance I saw last Thursday at the Barbican, each contrapuntal line was promptly accompanied by percussive sounds from the living, coughing away like fury (like pistol shots, like fury). You don't get that on the radio.

Radio 3's Beckett season has risen like the moon, shining clear on language and memory for the past couple of weeks and very welcome it has been. Appropriate, as well, seeing it was BBC Radio that became a firm friend and singular inspiration to Beckett. Inspiration? Think of his later plays, among them Rockaby and Krapp's Last Tape, which use recorded voices to piercing effect.

The late Martin Esslin, a great radio producer and drama scholar of mighty compass, thought the latter impossible to do on radio because of it, wondering how the double stage effect of tape then physical reaction to it could be made manifest.

Perhaps if Esslin could have heard Corin Redgrave's Radio 3 performance on April 9 he might have smiled and eaten a word or two. I thought it was superb, memory unspooling through his voice, pictures projecting from his words on to the inner eye of the listener.

Michael Gambon in Embers, that same night, a whole night of Beckett, was also quite remarkable. Embers is just as hard to do on radio, even though it was written for it (first broadcast in 1959, produced by Donald McWhinnie and with two great Beckett voices, Jack McGowran and Patrick Magee).

Here, an old man sits by the sea, remembering voices, people, sounds. Finally it fades away into sea sound, the shift of pebbles.

Don't ask what it means. It means what it says. Which, as Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter pointed out to Alice, is not at all the same as saying what you mean.

Beckett was always at pains not to say what he meant. What Beckett asks you to do is listen, feel. When you do, you hear the music of his work, the particular patterns of silence and sound that connect you directly to the speaker and to fragments of your own memory, which rise up, unbidden, under the plough of his words.

Some people find this hard. They want to know the message, the point. They would like it shown clearly, neatly parcelled, and when they don't get it, they cough. They also cough in concerts, as Daniel Barenboim in his current Reith Lectures, points out. They do not control the impulse or consider the effect on others of their rattles and explosions.

In the production of Waiting for Godot that I saw at the Barbican it didn't, in the end, matter because Johnny Murphy and Barry McGovern just stared out into the audience, as they were doing anyway, and the power of the words and the way they said them beamed straight through the coughs.

In John Tydeman's production for Radio 3 on Sunday every word was audible, every nuance lucid, even the stage directions from Nigel Anthony. Why say the stage directions? Because this is a tricky piece for radio, with its Laurel-and-Hardy moments and significant times of day.

Sean Barrett and David Burke were Vladimir and Estragon, Terence Rigby was Pozzo, all of them marvellous. The boy, better here than in the version at Dublin's Gate Theatre, was Zachary Fox. But what the radio couldn't give you was Louis le Brocquy's stage design, especially his tree, three leaves finally gleaming.

An extra reward for listening was A Ship of Voices, Simon Elmes's portrait in sound of Broadcasting House, making the shape, sketching the purpose of the building as it was and is becoming. Piers Plowright thought of it holding the ghosts of voices, Charles Chilton remembered listening to music through its air ducts, people recalled the view from its roof.

A jaunty 1930s song I'll BB Seeing You... put commas between past and present. Let the world cough. On the radio all was moonlight.